Posts Tagged ‘off-shore drilling’
global warming: solved »
Monday, October 5th, 2009
You may think it odd I can make such a claim, solving the prevailing issue of our days. We haven’t met, call me Draynd.
Anyway… For all those with smog-filled dreams, fret not. I have good news. (Of sorts.) Global warming is likely unavoidable but the blow will be softened. By oil.
Well, technically the lack of it. Black gold has turned Econ majors into bumbling morons. Demand has garnered no supply and has failed to produce viable alternatives, as predicted.
Here are a few fun notes:
- Four million barrels per day (BPD) less come out of the ground each year.
- There are no new worthwhile reserves to make that up (much less add to it to meet demand).
- Producing countries are fudging reserve estimates (probably because their production quotas are based on them).
- ANWR won’t produce 800k BPD until 2028 (even if all environmentalists are shot tomorrow). The US currently consumes 19 million BPD.
- More natural gas use means wells are losing pressure with maturity, proving we’re almost out of dino-puddles.
- Off-shore drilling is a pipe dream (har har) with rigs that barely stand up to category three storms.
- Gulf drills are still producing 250k less BPD than they were before Katrina.
- Producing countries are using more and more oil themselves, reducing exports.
Wind and solar power are far too inefficient. Any talk of hydrogen as fuel should be muted by its exponential cost and that it takes more energy to produce it than it provides, rendering it useless.
(Ethanol is too big a joke to laugh at here. Food costs, scarcity, nutrient and resource depletion, etc. Every subsidized ounce ruins our future. Rapidly.)
Food will be more expensive, exported jobs may return and travel will be cost prohibitive (any variety). “Think global, buy local” will be reality (not a hipster, ironic t-shirt slogan).
Cheap energy looks more like the last bits of milk shake than the mile-high gushers. With it goes the wholesale polluting that started the climate change mess and it will probably slow before the worst comes.
Global warming averted. World saved. What’s next?
Photo courtesy GreenPeace.org